"For years now, Linux has been a black sheep standing in the shadow of Apple and Microsoft. Despite having a fervent and enthusiastic following, the operating system hasn't been able to grab a sizable share of the computing market and has instead been content to subsist on the customers that come away dissatisfied with the mainstream competition. But that may be about to change. With the release of Microsoft Windows 8 on the horizon, some are saying Linux may have a great opportunity to steal a significant share of the market away from Microsoft, allowing it to finally take the helm as a major operating system service provider." This has to stop, and the only reason I'm linking to this nonsense is to make this very clear: Linux will not magically conquer the desktop or even make any significant gains because of Windows 8. People who don't like Windows 8 (Vista) will continue to use Windows 7 (Windows XP). This is getting so tiring. And does it even matter? Linux is winning big time in the mobile space, server space, and countless other spaces. The desktop is and always has been irrelevant to Linux.

While I have to admit I haven't seen many X crashes of late the last round of distros I loaded (6 months ago to be fair) had serious driver update issues. Sound going to crap (Pulseaudio still stinks) and wireless is like a bad joke. For everyone who thinks this is "trolling" I urge you to read the two links I'm gonna give you, one from one of the devs of RH that says the Linux desktop is "suckage" and lists many fundamental structural problems with the design, and the second is a list (with links) to around 200 major problems with Linux..

As a small shop owner that builds and sells PCs believe me I WANT Linux to get better, problem is politics and religious dogma have frankly crippled it and it isn't likely to get better in the near future. Too many critical subsystems from the kernel on up are constantly getting futzed with with ZERO thought to QA or QC or backwards compatibility, no hardware ABI means that you are at the mercy of the devs who may or may not have the time, manpower, or even access to the hardware that is screwed up to accurately diagnose and fix serious driver issues, and you can't just hand grandma a system which will have the wireless and sound crap out if she ever updates the thing.

one from one of the devs of RH that says the Linux desktop is "suckage" and lists many fundamental structural problems with the design

Ingo Molnar's complaints (the RH kernel dev) all revolve around software distribution and he proposes features he wants in a future software distribution technology. I'm guessing this is a prelude to something coming out of Red Hat which they hope will be picked up as a standard method of software distribution across all distros.

problem is politics and religious dogma have frankly crippled it

how has 'politics and religious dogma' crippled Linux, really?

no hardware ABI means that you are at the mercy of the devs who may or may not have the time, manpower, or even access to the hardware that is screwed up to accurately diagnose and fix serious driver issues

An abi change doesn't mean there's any changes to the actual functionality of the hardware drivers. I'd like to see any statistics on how many driver bug fixes are related to abi changes, I seriously doubt that is an issue.

And the devs do take responsibilty for keeping in-tree drivers up running against changes in the ABI, also there are lots of testers out there with a wide range of hardware reporting problems during the development cycles.

It's proprietary drivers which obviously needs to be maintained by third-party outside of the kernel, thankfully there are only very few of those these days as Linux supports an astounding amount of hardware right out of the box.